Rise and Rise of the Great White Witch: That's what her aristocrat husband called her BEFORE she divorced him for £17m. Now council house-born Pamela is demanding an £8m mansion from another super-rich ex

Lady Northampton, 62, had 60 days to leave the California property in March

Claims lover Dan Stoicescu promised to sign the house in her name

Their affair prompted an acrimonious divorce battle in High Court in 2012

Lord Northampton has a fortune of £120m, including two country estates

For a girl born into a council semi in Accrington, you can understand why Pamela Northampton — Pamela, Marchioness of Northampton to be precise — doesn’t want to let go of Lady’s Secret Court, her Californian home for the past three years.

Its seven bedrooms and eight bathrooms (the master en suite has his-and-hers bathtubs) have marble floors. There is a cinema, games room, and an arts and crafts room.

The house, in Rancho Santa Fe, is surrounded by a pool and a lake and rose gardens. Microsoft’s Bill Gates is a neighbour.

Battle: Lady Northampton (pictured left with Lord Northampton before their bitter divorce in 2012, is taking the lover she left him for, Dan Stoicescu (right), to court claiming she was wrongly evicted from a Californian mansion

Pamela’s
problem is that the owner of the beautiful estate, pharmaceutical tycoon
Dr Dan Stoicescu, for whom she left the hapless Marquess of Northampton
in 2010, is selling it from under her and has served her with an
eviction notice. He has placed it on the market for just over
£8 million, and has given her 60 days to leave.

Lady
Northampton — born Pamela Haworth, daughter of a Lancashire tool-maker —
is responding with the kind of defiance her previous husband knows only
too well. Although she and Dr Stoicescu were never married, she is
claiming ownership of the estate, based on intimate emails he sent her
while they were together.

The
6ft 4in Marquess — Spenny to his friends — had to fight hard to
restrict his own divorce settlement with her to £17 million, and that
was despite her beginning an affair with one of his friends. She and the
Marquess had been married for nearly 20 years. ‘She got £850,000 for
each year of their marriage,’ snaps one of his close chums.

Lavish: Lady Northampton returned to Rancho Sante Fe, San Diego, in March to find an eviction notice

At
62, Pamela is still something of a temptress. Like the Duchess of
Cambridge’s mother, Carole Middleton, Pamela — Mela to her friends —
started out as an air stewardess. Before Dr Stoicescu came along, she
had been married three times.

She
wed a Scots businessman when she was 18, and then a wealthy
Greek-American shipping financier when she was 31. When that marriage
ended in the late-Eighties, her property interests began. She was left
with the £2 million marital apartment near the Royal Albert Hall in
Kensington, which today would be worth in the region of £20 million.

Now
Pamela, who has no children, has filed a ferocious legal claim on the
Rancho Santa Fe property, into which she was moved by Dr Stoicescu in
December 2010 after Spenny Northampton ordered her out of his
magnificent home, the 84-room Tudor mansion Compton Wynyates, in
Warwickshire.

She
swiftly returned with removal vans to take her things, say friends of
the Marquess, and took the opportunity to have the artworks hanging on
the walls photographed for valuation through her solicitors.

Pamela’s
claim to Lady’s Secret Court is based on what she says are promises
from Dr Stoicescu that the estate would be hers for ever.

In
documents lodged at the Superior Court of the State of California in
San Diego, she claims he promised that she ‘would reside there and that
LSC [Lady’s Secret Court] together with all furniture and furnishings
would belong to her’.

She
quotes a series of affectionate emails from him, for example: ‘Thank
you so much for giving me back my soul and my life, nothing I’ll do in
the future will ever compensate that!’ And: ‘Do not worry a bit about
money, as I’ll support you all the way, my beloved.’

Certainly no one foresaw such an acrimonious ending to what had been an affair of unusual passion and secrecy.

The
slender honey-blonde had become Old Etonian Spenny’s fifth wife at a
register office wedding in Stratford-upon-Avon before Christmas 1990.

Dubbed
the ‘mystic Marquess’ because of his fascination with spirituality and
Freemasonry, he’d been introduced to Pamela at a party by friends.

They
married within months and he declared: ‘She is the centre of my life. I
call her “Stregissima — Great White Witch”. She is a healer, very good
at relaxing me.’ Perhaps they might still have been married had they not
met Dan Stoicescu at a Freemasonry convention in Cyprus in 2006.

Worth
£200 million, the balding scientist and entrepreneur was soon invited
to Compton Wynyates. The couple were both intrigued by Dr Stoicescu,
whose main home was by Lake Geneva in Switzerland, because of his
‘transhumanist’ beliefs — the conviction that technology can overcome
human limitations.

He
was interested in immortality and anti-ageing therapies, convinced that
life can be ‘extended through nano-technology and artificial
intelligence’.

He
told the couple he was only the second person ever to have his genome
mapped — charting a body’s DNA and genetic make-up — at a cost of
£220,000 and generously paid double that for both of the Northamptons to
go through the process at a clinic in the U.S.

The
divorced father-of-one, whose fortune came from cancer care products,
was also generous to Pamela’s father Jim, buying him a £1,300 bottle of
wine from Harrods and a Rolex watch.

But
in 2009, the Marquess began to suspect that his wife was having an
affair with the Romanian. Pamela had been to New York for meetings with
Dr Stoicescu — he had made her president of one of his pharmaceutical
companies.

On
her return to Compton Wynyates, Spenny noticed that she was not wearing
her wedding ring. Her explanation was that during the flight her
fingers had swollen and she’d had the band cut off.

Her
trips abroad became more frequent, and Spenny realised that she now
possessed a Roland Cartier gold and diamond necklace. In fact this was
just one of several pieces of jewellery that Pamela, then 58, had been
bought by her lover.

The
affair was finally exposed when Lord Northampton was given tapes of
phone conversations between his wife and her father Jim, now 89. They
had been secretly recorded by Jim’s then partner Suzanne, who was fond
of Spenny and upset at Pamela’s deceit.

The
Marquess was heartbroken and threw his wife out. Their divorce dispute
over a financial pay-off was heading for the High Court when the
settlement of £17 million was arranged just over a year ago. They have
never met since.

But
just as he was being named in court as Lady Northampton’s lover, Dr
Stoicescu, 62, was embarking on another affair behind her back. By late
2012 he was married to Maria Torres, 50, from Santa Domingo in the
Dominican Republic.

Unsurprisingly,
some of Spenny’s friends can hardly conceal their glee at the break-up
of Pamela’s relationship with Dr Stoicescu.

‘After
what she did to Spenny, I can’t pretend I wanted her to live happily
ever after,’ one admits. ‘But she is tough, and Dan Stoicescu is in for a
fight.’

T
hat certainly seems to be the case. In her affidavit, Pamela is not
only claiming that the ownership of the Rancho Santa Fe house and its
contents should be transferred to her, but is also claiming $10 million
(£6 million) ‘special damages’, representing the value of other property
and the financial support that was allegedly promised but not paid.

She
is also seeking general damages of $25,000 (£14,600) for her ‘severe
emotional distress . . . anxiety, sleeplessness, depression and
humiliation’.

She
maintains Stoicescu ‘verbally promised’ her that he would transfer the
property into her name once her divorce was final. In the court papers,
she produces an email from Stoicescu dated June 22, 2012, which says:
‘. . . right now, the only thing I can tell you is that LSC is yours and
will remain yours for ever, and I’ll do all the paperwork needed to
provide you with security.’

Other
emails are documented to show what she claims was the depth of their
relationship. ‘Your honesty and beautiful mind and warm, good vibes can
only mean shared fulfilment of these crazy objectives,’ she quotes him
as saying.

The
papers also disclose how Stoicescu had promised to keep her in the
style to which she had become accustomed, including £30,000 a month to
cover her ‘personal girlish stuff’.

Pamela
has added one additional and highly personal reason why she does not
want to leave the estate. She scattered her mother’s ashes there. This
means, she claims, she has a ‘personal, emotional and permanent’
investment in it.

In
a counter-claim, Dr Stoicescu insists Lady Northampton has no
‘enforceable contract supporting her claim’ beyond a memorandum which
outlines a number of options for the future of the property.Pamela
remains at the disputed property, while Dr Stoicescu is dividing his
time between his home near Geneva, a skiing lodge in Verbier and a house
in Bucharest.

Lord
Northampton, a mere spectator to this domestic wrangling, is reluctant
to say much but told us: ‘It doesn’t surprise me that this is going on.’

His
friends are less restrained. ‘Pamela is one of the most diabolical
bitches I have had the misfortune of knowing,’ says one. ‘There’s no
sympathy for either her or Stoicescu.’

Since
the divorce, the ever-optimistic Spenny has married for a sixth time,
to psychotherapist Tracy Goodman. ‘I am very happy now with a very
special person,’ he says.

As for his colourful ex-wife — well, she is very much available, should the right man come along . . .

Interior: Dr Stoiescu bought the lavish property in 2010. His lawyers have claimed Lady Northampton has no evidence to back claims their client told her she would sign over the house

Estate: Her ex-husband is one of the richest men in Britain with a fortune of around £120million, including two country houses

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Lady Northampton is demanding an £8m mansion from another super-rich ex